May 8, 2025 05:49 AM
(This post was last modified: May 8, 2025 05:53 AM by Magical Realist.)
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/...passes-you
"Every so often scientists do something like this: they take a bunch of listeners to classical music and monitor their vitals as they sit in a concert hall together. Then they notice something strange, which is that not just people’s movements but their actual vitals themselves begin to synchronize—measures like heart or respiration rate, even their skin conductance response. Similar findings are easy to come across, such as how, when looking at brain-to-brain neural synchrony, romantic couples are more neurally synchronized during a conversation than strangers are. This isn’t fringe stuff—both those links go to Nature, one of the premier scientific journals.
These sort of studies always remind me of an issue in consciousness research called the binding problem. You experience a single stream of consciousness, one in which everything, your percepts and sensations and emotions, are bound together, and the “problem” is that we don’t know how this works. It’s difficult to figure out because this binding is fractal, all the way down; you don’t experience colors and shapes separately, you experience a colored shape. But how do the contents get affixed together in consciousness in all the complex ways they’re supposed to? Via what rule does it work? One popular answer in the neuroscientific literature is that binding occurs via a process best described as “information transmission plus synchronization.” Neurons fire at a particular frequency in one region of the brain, which then synchronize with another region’s firing. In other words, parts of the brain dance.
Assume this answer is true for a moment. According to neuroscience’s answer to the binding problem, if you synchronize different parts of the brain, you get a single consciousness bound together. So following the idea’s logic: if you synchronized different people, what do you get? Is it not at least imaginable you could get some sort of experience that goes beyond any individual person’s consciousness? A group mind?
If one looks at cultures from an anthropological perspective, one sees ecstatic behavior—seizures, loss of consciousness, dramatic personality shifts—almost exclusively within atmospheric rituals of synchronization and repetition. Like in the famous Trance and Dance in Bali, a short film made by anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead when visiting Indonesia in the 1930s. The elaborate dance culminates in a scene where women fanatically press and slash their sharp kris knives against their bodies, and yet seem strangely unharmed and uncaring as they careen about.
In occult practices, such joint ritual and concentration has traditionally been the way to summon an egregore—the occult term for a psychic entity much like a group mind. The poet William Butler Yeats used to attempt this as a member of one of the most influential groups of Western magic practitioners, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which began in secret in 1887 London. For the members, magic and mediumship were not really about commanding supernatural forces to cast spells, but rather magic was entirely a psychic phenomenon, in that it was all about changing consciousness—whether your own, or the group’s—and this was done through ritual, dance, and drugs. As Dion Fortune, one of the most famous and influential female occultists of the time, wrote:
'Occult science, rightly understood, teaches us to regard all things as states of consciousness, and then shows us how to gain control of consciousness subjectively; which, once acquired, is soon reflected objectively. By means of this conscious control we are able to manipulate the plane of the human mind.'
Yeats himself believed that egregores were the source of the magic of a coven, and that all magic was really the creation of group minds by “recurrent meditation.” But he also warned that, if not made explicitly benevolent, an egregore could be disastrous, as
'this personality, if it has any continued life at all, is bound to grow stronger, to grow more individual, and to grow more complex, and to grow at the expense of the life about it, for there is but one life. Incarnate life, just in so far as it is incarnate, is an open or veiled struggle of life against life. . .'
I’m definitely not endorsing the veracity of old occult techniques, merely pointing out that if we keep the proposed solution to the binding problem from cognitive science in mind, then using things like ritual, dance, and drugs for these purposes is unsurprising.
Of course, the binding of parts of consciousness into a greater whole, even within a single brain, could require more than mere synchronization and information transmission—cognitive science’s proposed solution to the binding problem could be too simple. Nor does this supposed answer tell us what degree of transmission or synchronize would be meaningful. Perhaps it’s a very high bar which no lower-bandwidth brain-to-brain physical communication could ever overcome. All that could be true. But still, I think it’s worth looking around in our culture and our technology for where these forces are most at play. A certain answer springs to mind, which is that the place where we moderns are most synchronized while also transmitting the most information is not at football stadiums or in concert hall, but via our screens. Which would imply....."
"Every so often scientists do something like this: they take a bunch of listeners to classical music and monitor their vitals as they sit in a concert hall together. Then they notice something strange, which is that not just people’s movements but their actual vitals themselves begin to synchronize—measures like heart or respiration rate, even their skin conductance response. Similar findings are easy to come across, such as how, when looking at brain-to-brain neural synchrony, romantic couples are more neurally synchronized during a conversation than strangers are. This isn’t fringe stuff—both those links go to Nature, one of the premier scientific journals.
These sort of studies always remind me of an issue in consciousness research called the binding problem. You experience a single stream of consciousness, one in which everything, your percepts and sensations and emotions, are bound together, and the “problem” is that we don’t know how this works. It’s difficult to figure out because this binding is fractal, all the way down; you don’t experience colors and shapes separately, you experience a colored shape. But how do the contents get affixed together in consciousness in all the complex ways they’re supposed to? Via what rule does it work? One popular answer in the neuroscientific literature is that binding occurs via a process best described as “information transmission plus synchronization.” Neurons fire at a particular frequency in one region of the brain, which then synchronize with another region’s firing. In other words, parts of the brain dance.
Assume this answer is true for a moment. According to neuroscience’s answer to the binding problem, if you synchronize different parts of the brain, you get a single consciousness bound together. So following the idea’s logic: if you synchronized different people, what do you get? Is it not at least imaginable you could get some sort of experience that goes beyond any individual person’s consciousness? A group mind?
If one looks at cultures from an anthropological perspective, one sees ecstatic behavior—seizures, loss of consciousness, dramatic personality shifts—almost exclusively within atmospheric rituals of synchronization and repetition. Like in the famous Trance and Dance in Bali, a short film made by anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead when visiting Indonesia in the 1930s. The elaborate dance culminates in a scene where women fanatically press and slash their sharp kris knives against their bodies, and yet seem strangely unharmed and uncaring as they careen about.
In occult practices, such joint ritual and concentration has traditionally been the way to summon an egregore—the occult term for a psychic entity much like a group mind. The poet William Butler Yeats used to attempt this as a member of one of the most influential groups of Western magic practitioners, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which began in secret in 1887 London. For the members, magic and mediumship were not really about commanding supernatural forces to cast spells, but rather magic was entirely a psychic phenomenon, in that it was all about changing consciousness—whether your own, or the group’s—and this was done through ritual, dance, and drugs. As Dion Fortune, one of the most famous and influential female occultists of the time, wrote:
'Occult science, rightly understood, teaches us to regard all things as states of consciousness, and then shows us how to gain control of consciousness subjectively; which, once acquired, is soon reflected objectively. By means of this conscious control we are able to manipulate the plane of the human mind.'
Yeats himself believed that egregores were the source of the magic of a coven, and that all magic was really the creation of group minds by “recurrent meditation.” But he also warned that, if not made explicitly benevolent, an egregore could be disastrous, as
'this personality, if it has any continued life at all, is bound to grow stronger, to grow more individual, and to grow more complex, and to grow at the expense of the life about it, for there is but one life. Incarnate life, just in so far as it is incarnate, is an open or veiled struggle of life against life. . .'
I’m definitely not endorsing the veracity of old occult techniques, merely pointing out that if we keep the proposed solution to the binding problem from cognitive science in mind, then using things like ritual, dance, and drugs for these purposes is unsurprising.
Of course, the binding of parts of consciousness into a greater whole, even within a single brain, could require more than mere synchronization and information transmission—cognitive science’s proposed solution to the binding problem could be too simple. Nor does this supposed answer tell us what degree of transmission or synchronize would be meaningful. Perhaps it’s a very high bar which no lower-bandwidth brain-to-brain physical communication could ever overcome. All that could be true. But still, I think it’s worth looking around in our culture and our technology for where these forces are most at play. A certain answer springs to mind, which is that the place where we moderns are most synchronized while also transmitting the most information is not at football stadiums or in concert hall, but via our screens. Which would imply....."
